Tracking and managing computer systems and other equipment can be a monumental task, especially when a large number of items are being tracked. Typically, tracking is performed manually. For example, office equipment for large companies is often manually tracked and managed, and the number of items being tracked may be in the thousands. Employees physically check each piece of equipment for inventory and to update equipment locations. Similarly, large data centers may contain thousands of computer systems that are manually tracked and managed. Manual tracking typically includes physically finding the server or other item being tracked. The location of the server may be written down and then manually entered into a spreadsheet or database. This task is repeated for each server and whenever maintenance is performed that requires movement of a server. The time and expense of manually tracking the computer systems and other equipment is astronomical. Furthermore, errors in entering location information for equipment may waste an enormous amount of time and expense when attempting to find malfunctioning equipment having improperly entered location information.
In addition to tracking equipment, managing the equipment is another monumental task. For example, a data center or other environments may have policies for managing equipment, such as only authorized personnel are allowed to remove servers from a rack. However, implementing the policies and providing notifications of violations is a difficult task. For example, an authorized employee removes a server to take a picture for a company brochure. The server is replaced by the employee but has inadvertently become unplugged. It may take several hours for an administrator to identify the problem and find the server that was unplugged. Furthermore, although the policy of no unauthorized server removal was created, there is no means of automatically implementing and detecting a violation.